Little wat ye wha's comin

This "Highland Muster Roll" is said to date from the Fifteen, the first of the two disastrous Jacobite Rebellions, one in 1715 and the other in 1745.

The Stuarts were less than impressive as a royal house, though hard to beat from the point of tragic romance and inspiration for centuries of really good novels and music.  The memorable Mary Queen of Scots wasn't easy to take seriously as a monarch.  After she languished in prison for years and was beheaded by Elizabeth I, her son became James I of England (and VI of Scotland) in 1603, when Elizabeth died without issue.  We'll cut James I some slack because of the Bible.  After his death in 1625, however, his moderately useless son and successor Charles I channeled his grandmother by contriving to get himself executed by Parliament in 1649.  Then, after an Interregnum of eleven years, in 1660, Charles I's son Charles II was ecstatically welcomed back in the Restoration, but the honeymoon didn't last long.

On his death without legitimate issue in 1685 (his impressive list of little FitzRoys notwithstanding), Charles II was succeeded by his younger brother James II (and VII of Scotland).  James II got everyone's knickers in a twist with his crypto-Catholicism and other unpopular traits.  After producing two reasonably solid Protestant daughters, he terrified everyone in 1688, in only the third year of his reign, by producing a male Catholic heir, the man who would have been James III but instead comes down to history as James "the Old Pretender."

Upon the birth of the Old Pretender, James II's elder daughter Mary had to be asked to come over from Holland with her husband William of Orange, who was also a Stuart of sorts.  James II, having fled to the Continent in 1688, was conveniently considered to have abdicated.  (He made an abortive attempt at recapturing his throne in 1689, then took shelter with Louis XIV of France until his death in 1701.)  William and Mary assumed the throne jointly in 1688 as Mary II and William II (and III of Scotland).  They produced no heirs.  After Mary's death in 1694 and William's in 1702, Mary's younger sister Anne reigned until her death in 1714, leaving no surviving issue despite 17 pregnancies.  At this point, the succession becomes hopelessly confused, because James II and his son and grandson were still pressing their noses against the windowpane from exile, but when the dust settled everyone had agreed that the great point was never to let anyone associated with James II get near the crown again.  In 1707, planning ahead, Parliament had passed an Act awarding the throne in advance to a second cousin from Germany called George, who was maternally descended from James I.  George I ruled from 1714 through 1727 and was succeeded by George II.

Meanwhile, James II's son, the Old Pretender, entertained designs on the English and Scottish thrones in a more or less serious fashion for his entire life (he died in exile 1766), of which the Fifteen, in the first year of George I's reign, was the most serious example.  The Old Pretender's son Charles (a/k/a the Young Pretender or Bonnie Prince Charlie) carried on the family tradition in the equally disastrous '45 Uprising, during the reign of George II, after which the whole Stuart business was more or less thoroughly crushed.  The Young Pretender died in exile 1788.

The Georges may have been Stuarts of a sort, but they associated themselves more strongly with the name of Hanover.  The name George lives on in a series of infuriated Jacobite Rebellion songs about little German nitwits names Geordie.